The annual meeting of the philosophically challenged met to hear the eminent professor, Louis V Socratrees. His visit and expected lecture on the virtues of the placement of ceilings in the modern technological world was anticipated by most as the highlight of the meeting.

“Ceilings,” he began to the hushed room, “are there for a purpose. And that purpose is logical and at the same time baffling and tiresome to those who require a straight answer to most questions.

They are there in most rooms you enter to remind us that we have to continue the struggle to achieve what most would consider the impossible.

Ceilings represent those things in life we crave for but never achieve. The pursuit of happiness is one we occasionally get fleeting glimpses of like when you win a lottery prize, score a goal or take your first wicket in your first test match.

That sense of satisfaction within us is but temporary.

The ceiling in any room you can jump up and touch, but you never cling to it.

As the eminent Dr Vermuri states ceilings are imaginatively designed, they exist in our lives not to make the impossible seem further out of our reach but us to dream of achieving what we might perceive is out of our reach.”

The good professor did live up to his name, and the audience sat riveted to his every word.

To illustrate that what might seem impossible could be achieved he handed out signed pieces of plaster board which he said he had taken from the ceiling in his kitchen as an illustration of the impossible being achievable.

His audience held their piece reverently in their hands, some imagined immediately of mounting their piece, some saw theirs as framed, and one small man in the back row thought the whole thing was a load of rubbish.

He had solved the mystery by putting his ceiling on the floor. As philosophically challenged as he was, in his mind, he had staged a coup.